The Biggar Picture: The Business Optimization Blog

The economy is responsible for a lot of things these days… some good and, well, a lot not so good. I don’t know about you, but I’m really tired of all the negativity.

I am a firm believer that something good can, and usually does, come out of every bad situation – the proverbial silver lining if you will. Further, I believe that in difficult times people generally tend to be more open to new ideas. Somehow, in dealing with adversity we gain new insights and new perspectives on even the most routine things. Anyway, that’s what I think.

But what I do know is that in the IT world, the economy has fueled the adoption of virtualization technologies – both server and importantly, storage and in doing so, has enabled business to improve efficiencies, cut costs and streamline business processes. The customers we talk with tell us this – and research by various industry analyst firms confirms it.

Actually, while I’m not at all surprised by the growth the virtualization market has experienced over the last year or so (virtualization has a powerful economics story), some of the recent stats I’ve heard on server virtualization use in production environments are significantly higher than I thought they’d be. ESG, for example, says 51% of organizations with 5,000 to 19,999 employees are using server virtualization in production environments [Source: ESG Reference Research: x86 Server  Virtualization Adoption by Company Size and Number of Servers, March 2009]. That’s a pretty impressive number.

There’s also clearly a link between DR and server virtualization. In fact, more and more organizations are beginning to see this powerful connection.  Server virtualization enables organizations to expand DR to more applications and data types, which means greater protection, improved availability (i.e., less downtime) and lower risk.

Of course, not all DR Solutions for virtualized environments are created equally. Hitachi Storage Cluster for Microsoft Hyper-V marries key platform capabilities of Microsoft Windows environments (specifically, virtualization and clustering) with the rich platform capabilities of Hitachi storage (specifically, system-based replication and storage virtualization) for the purpose of improving availability and optimizing and expanding disaster recovery to additional applications or data types in virtualized Windows environments.

A definite silver lining by anyone’s standards – especially in today’s economy!